December 13, 2012

Are Fashion’s Signs Of The Times Changing? From DKNY And Yves St Laurent To Chanel And Burberry.... They Are All Part Of Our Meaning Creation Journeys.

Fashion is central to
our very human desire to express identity through and make meaning from
symbols. It is social. It is cultural. And its standards and styles are always
shifting with the times.

To maintain its
relevance and desire, fashion’s survival needs to be with, and even ahead of,
style and culture. To use that most hyperbolic of terms, it must be forever sharpened
and wielded at the ‘cutting edge’. But in recent years, arguably since most of
us logged on to the Internet and gained instant access to the latest styles and
the cultures that birthed them, the cutting edge has become duller and duller
as some of the exclusivities of haute couture and subculture dissolved.

Depending on your carbon
dating of subculture – the hooligans of late 1800s England or the hot-rodders
of 1950s America – youth groups throughout modern history have been defining
themselves in opposition to a so-called mainstream by striving to be
oxymoronically unfashionable. For them, transgressive, disheveled, apathetic or
just plain grungy styles or anti-fashions have been an instant way to
communicate values, behaviors and meanings that sit far to the left or right of
the Ralph Lauren equestrian blazer crowd.

Inevitably, however, the
styles of subcultures are co-opted or adopted for wear and sale by the very
mainstream that young, culturally creative rebels sought to distinguish
themselves from in the first place: those James Dean jeans are now acceptable
office wear; the Doc Martens of bad-boy Brit skinheads are now for sale on shoe
shelves everywhere, right next to Crocs; and the mohawks that punk rockers used
to scare the shit out of old ladies in the late 1970s have been neatly trimmed
down to fit on the heads of teen idols everywhere.

Back in the day, Plato
observed that truth does not reside in what we simply see. Like most of his
favorite topics and like the many other philosophers who sought to identify the
true qualities of objects, he was correct. The idea that clothes make the man
or that platform shoes with a 6-inch heel establish unassailable sexiness is
nonsense. They don’t. We only think they do.

Culture bridges the
distance between style and consumption. More specifically, style – the
information we send out by wearing clothes – is an arbitrary agreement made by
the social majority to see things as filled with meaning. This importance and
meaning is supported only by convention, what Roland Barthes would have called
a mythology. People see such signs as stylish, fashionable or valuable only
because, as parts of symbolic language, we have decided this is what they are
supposed to tell us. If we all woke up tomorrow with collective amnesia, having
forgotten this social agreement, these things would have no meaning.

“All
the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” These lines
from Shakespeare’s As You Like It
illustrate Erving Goffman’s sociological theory of dramaturgy – that social
identity is created as it is performed both to our selves and to others. Using
the theatre as a metaphor to analyze social interactions, he described people
as actors playing roles on stages of everyday life: back stage, where
performances like getting dressed in the morning occur privately; and front
stage, where rocking Louboutins on the street is a public statement. As
symbolic enactments through which our experiences are ordered and we represent
who we are, all action is meaningful social expression and all spaces, places
and objects help make that meaning. In these performances, our preferred
products and brands function as props that communicate cultural narratives of
identity. For Goffman, we make the most of our performances and props to
control or guide the impression that other people will have of us.

Adapted from an article by Idris Mootee and Paul
Hartley in the upcoming Dec isseu of MISC the STYLE issue available in bookstores in 28 countries or ipad edition.

Comments

Are Fashion’s Signs Of The Times Changing? From DKNY And Yves St Laurent To Chanel And Burberry.... They Are All Part Of Our Meaning Creation Journeys.

Fashion is central to
our very human desire to express identity through and make meaning from
symbols. It is social. It is cultural. And its standards and styles are always
shifting with the times.

To maintain its
relevance and desire, fashion’s survival needs to be with, and even ahead of,
style and culture. To use that most hyperbolic of terms, it must be forever sharpened
and wielded at the ‘cutting edge’. But in recent years, arguably since most of
us logged on to the Internet and gained instant access to the latest styles and
the cultures that birthed them, the cutting edge has become duller and duller
as some of the exclusivities of haute couture and subculture dissolved.

Depending on your carbon
dating of subculture – the hooligans of late 1800s England or the hot-rodders
of 1950s America – youth groups throughout modern history have been defining
themselves in opposition to a so-called mainstream by striving to be
oxymoronically unfashionable. For them, transgressive, disheveled, apathetic or
just plain grungy styles or anti-fashions have been an instant way to
communicate values, behaviors and meanings that sit far to the left or right of
the Ralph Lauren equestrian blazer crowd.

Inevitably, however, the
styles of subcultures are co-opted or adopted for wear and sale by the very
mainstream that young, culturally creative rebels sought to distinguish
themselves from in the first place: those James Dean jeans are now acceptable
office wear; the Doc Martens of bad-boy Brit skinheads are now for sale on shoe
shelves everywhere, right next to Crocs; and the mohawks that punk rockers used
to scare the shit out of old ladies in the late 1970s have been neatly trimmed
down to fit on the heads of teen idols everywhere.

Back in the day, Plato
observed that truth does not reside in what we simply see. Like most of his
favorite topics and like the many other philosophers who sought to identify the
true qualities of objects, he was correct. The idea that clothes make the man
or that platform shoes with a 6-inch heel establish unassailable sexiness is
nonsense. They don’t. We only think they do.

Culture bridges the
distance between style and consumption. More specifically, style – the
information we send out by wearing clothes – is an arbitrary agreement made by
the social majority to see things as filled with meaning. This importance and
meaning is supported only by convention, what Roland Barthes would have called
a mythology. People see such signs as stylish, fashionable or valuable only
because, as parts of symbolic language, we have decided this is what they are
supposed to tell us. If we all woke up tomorrow with collective amnesia, having
forgotten this social agreement, these things would have no meaning.

“All
the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” These lines
from Shakespeare’s As You Like It
illustrate Erving Goffman’s sociological theory of dramaturgy – that social
identity is created as it is performed both to our selves and to others. Using
the theatre as a metaphor to analyze social interactions, he described people
as actors playing roles on stages of everyday life: back stage, where
performances like getting dressed in the morning occur privately; and front
stage, where rocking Louboutins on the street is a public statement. As
symbolic enactments through which our experiences are ordered and we represent
who we are, all action is meaningful social expression and all spaces, places
and objects help make that meaning. In these performances, our preferred
products and brands function as props that communicate cultural narratives of
identity. For Goffman, we make the most of our performances and props to
control or guide the impression that other people will have of us.

Adapted from an article by Idris Mootee and Paul
Hartley in the upcoming Dec isseu of MISC the STYLE issue available in bookstores in 28 countries or ipad edition.